Журнал Viche 2006 №24

№24, 2006

Esey speaks about treason

“This night is darker than Azef”. It is the line from the poem “Cloud in trousers” by Volodymyr Mayakovs’kyi. What can be compared with darkness of Odessa night, where the twenty four years old meat mountain that went mad because of jealousies tosses about? Only the black Azef’s soul - the soul of betrayer, provoker, killer, let alone other shallow pranks punished by condemning to penal servitude.

What a pity. When the name Yevno Feshelevych Azef became the common name, Oleksandr Dyuma had died already. It was the character worth of his writing. It was a current adventure novel. It contained everything: poverties, and ambition, and high cabinets with the proud carriages of rulers, and cachectic regents, and orders, and money, much money, and dark cellars, where bold plots were made, and love. But there was no generosity. But Dyuma would have invented it, if he hadn’t begun to tell God some history, in order that he, sinful, was admitted to paradise.

Certainly, such colourful personage, as Yevno Azef, did not remain out of attention of masters of word. There is a great number of the publicistic articles and even the historical prospecting “The History of One Treason”. But Azef’s life is obviously incompatible with the newspaper column. And scientific magnifying glass will not take in it. Life masterpiece is worth literary masterpiece.

I do not pretend to such high mission. I’m not very interested in dark paths and dirty backyards. Hanging in uninhabited suburbs and explosions of bombs on central highways.  Escapes, pursuits, police files, stolen cashes. I’m not interested in Azef essentially. I need his soul - black betrayer’s soul. And his soul is the darkest.

 

Some kind of epilogue

 

Deftness, cunning, character and striving for victory are valued in sport, as well as in treason. These worth of being admired qualities require improving, permanent training, standard worthy of imitation, as they say, traditions. But all this is vainness, it is nothing without a divine spark that makes a competitor to be the first among equal. However one thinks that everything is not so easy for those, who betray, and even more for those, who is betrayed. There is something that resists any training; it is able to betray the most cynical player and an average booby, who has already gotten used with this role. Let’s name this mutinous and anarchic element, for example, a soul.

Valentyn BUSHANS’KYI